


A Chain of Light

by madamebadger



Category: Mass Effect
Genre: Alien Biology, Canon-Typical Violence, Confessions, F/M, Friendship, Hurt/Comfort, Injury, Sentinel Shepard, Technobabble, spacer shepard
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-04-07
Updated: 2014-04-14
Packaged: 2018-01-18 11:20:34
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 10,477
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1426591
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/madamebadger/pseuds/madamebadger
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>When Garrus is injured on a routine expedition and planetary conditions delay their evac, Shepard is forced to confront the way their relationship has blurred her role as both his commander and his lover.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> This fic contains Star Trek-like made-up science that doesn't stand up to even the slightest scrutiny. Nobody reverses the polarity and there are no tachyon emissions, but it's basically that kind of thing. ;)
> 
> Set at some vague point after Mass Effect 2 but before Arrival.

“What I would really like to know,” Tali said over the comm, as she took point with shotgun and drone, “is why these merc squads keep coming after us. They always start the fight and they never win it. That’s just _stupid_.”

“I don’t think that quality decision-making is a recruiting requirement for cannon fodder,” Garrus said dryly, taking his place behind cover.

“Well, no,” Tali said, “but you’d think there’d at least be some natural selection at work.”

Shepard was glad for the helmet that hid her unprofessional grin. “Incoming,” she warned them.

Really, Tali had a point, Shepard reflected as she checked her heat sink. They’d dropped by Eistol to check for a lost comm probe; if they’d been allowed to just get in and out, nobody would have had to get shot. But as always, some merc squad felt they _had_ to prove themselves by trying to take her out.

The fact that it had never, not once, actually worked did not seem to deter them.

“On it,” Garrus said, and Tali made an affirmative noise.

It wasn’t a particularly big group; Blood Pack by the membership and the armor—and the tendency to hollering and charging. Tali’s drone buzzed into the fray, needling and distracting. Shepard summoned a crackling veil of biotic energy and slung it at the distracted frontline krogans, knocking them back with the power of her warp. Over the hum of the mass effect field around her body and the thunder of Tali’s shotgun, she could hear the intermittent report of Garrus’ rifle from his position behind cover: slower, but sure, each shot dropping a mercenary with a neat headshot.

“Tali’s right, though,” Garrus drawled, his voice over the comm just loud enough inside the confines of Shepard’s helmet to be audible even over the sounds of combat. “You’d think they’d learn.”

Shepard noted a cluster of vorcha working their way up; with their rapid regenerative abilities, they’d need a hard hit to take them out. She summoned her own combat drone and set it to explode upon destruction. Vorcha could never resist a glowing target right under their noses, and as soon as they tackled it… “You know, Garrus,” she said, “we humans have a saying about not tempting fate.”

“Yeah, but I happen to know you also have a saying, ‘Fate favors the prepared,’ which also seems applicable here.”

“And something about being master of your fate? Ashley used to say that,” Tali said.

“Yeah, all right,” Shepard said, grinning behind her helmet, “so human sayings contradict each other a lot.” Her drone exploded with a satisfying thunder, taking out the cluster of vorcha mercs. 

“So do quarian sayings,” Tali said ruefully. There was the familiar static hiss as she drained the energy from one of the remaining krogan’s tech shield—and within the next second, as choreographed as a dance, the krogan’s faceplate shattered with a rifle shot. _Goddamn_ , Garrus could make sniping sexy.

And he probably knew it, too. “Turian sayings don’t,” he said, sounding insufferably smug.

“That’s because turians lack flexibility of mind,” Tali said primly, and Garrus laughed.

“All right, cleanup—” Shepard began, and then heard a muffled grunt from Garrus. “Problem?”

“Stray shot,” he said, voice tight. “Bastards got lucky.”

Shepard could see on her HUD that he’d already applied medigel, so she said, “All right, hold tight and let the gel work. Tali, you and me.”

“Got it,” Tali said, and within minutes the remaining mercenary troops were either down or fleeing.

***

Tali and Shepard made their way back to Garrus’ position. “At least we’ve got the information from that probe,” Tali said.

“And we can get off this godforsaken rock,” Shepard agreed. Eistol was nothing much to speak of: breathable atmosphere, but freezingly cold, beset by slashing winds and naught but barren rock as far as the eye could see. “Let’s head for the drop point.”

As they approached, she saw that Garrus was leaning against the rock formation he’d been using for cover. That wasn’t unusual. What _was_ unusual was that he didn’t straighten up when they got close. And even before she could ask, he said, “Shepard,” in a way that told her immediately that something was wrong. “I don’t think I’m going to be able to make it on foot to the drop point. Not without a break to rest, at least.” His voice was thin enough that Shepard had to strain to hear him over the whistle of the wind. 

Shepard stopped and looked at him. She’d worked with a lot of people during her career—a _lot_ —and some of them, seasoned soldiers though they were, had a bit of the whiner in their nature. Some of them, if they said that they needed to stop, you had to question them, push them a little.

Garrus was not like that. The only time she could remember him complaining about pain was when he’d told her not to make him laugh because his face hurt, after a one-on-one with a rocket… and that had been a _joke_. If Garrus had a problem, it was pushing on when he ought to slow down a little.

“What—” she began, and then she noticed that he was holding his side, and the deep blue of turian blood stained his fingers. “Garrus,” she said, startled, “I thought you used the medigel—”

“First dose,” he said, “but that didn’t clear it up.” That wasn’t uncommon; an unlucky wound in a bad place might need two or even three shots. “And then the dispenser jammed. I think it was hit, too.”

“You should have said something—”

“Was hoping I could push through,” he interrupted, and even through his helmet she could see the self-deprecating way his eyes narrowed. “But it looks like no.”

“How bad—”

“It’s just a flesh wound, I think,” he said, and she suspected he was downplaying it to make her feel better. “Definitely didn’t hit any bones, and I think probably not any organs.”

Shepard didn’t like that ‘probably,’ and from Tali’s sharply-drawn breath it seemed she didn’t like it any better. Tali activated her omnitool, fingers flying over the keyboard; Shepard trusted her enough that she didn’t even bother asking what she was up to, instead keeping her attention on Garrus. “We need to stop and stabilize you at the very least. Get you out of the armor and apply it manually—”

“Not a good idea,” Tali said. Worry twanged in her voice. “There’s a storm coming up, it’s on all of my sensors, and it would be very bad for any of us to be out in it. Injured or not. We can’t make it to the drop point in time.”

“Can we get a message to the Normandy?”

More typing, and then a frustrated exhale. “No. Remember the ion veil we noticed around the planet.”

“EDI said that wouldn’t inhibit communication.”

“It wouldn’t normally, but the storm is intensifying the effect into a sort of reflective ionization blanket that’s bouncing my signal right back at me. We can’t get word to them that we need a new drop location, and we definitely shouldn’t get Garrus out of his armor to treat him when we’re exposed like this. I’ve sent Chatika off to scout for somewhere we can weather it.”

“Thanks, Tali,” Shepard said. “Garrus, how far can you walk?”

“Not far,” Garrus admitted. She couldn’t see much of his face with the helmet still on, but she could see that the skin around his eyes was a more silvery shade than usual, something she knew was a sign of stress or anxiety in a turian. “A little ways.”

“Found something!” Tali said. “It’s not much, a cave, but it’ll get us out of the wind and wet. Maybe two hundred meters that way?”

“I can manage that,” Garrus said, and Shepard gave him a short nod.

***

At first Garrus managed—slow, holding his side and leaving a trail of blue splatters behind him, but walking steadily. He even made light of the rising bad weather: “Good thing there’s snow falling. It’ll keep those mercs from following my blood trail.”

But he stopped talking after fifty meters or so, and by a hundred he couldn’t walk easily on his own. Shepard moved to his uninjured side and hooked his arm over her shoulder, and Tali, without any prompting, stationed herself on his other side to keep him from stumbling. The last fifty meters, Shepard was afraid they’d have to drag him.

And the storm chasing them didn’t help. Around them, the wind rose to a scream, buffeting them and hindering their attempts to walk in a straight line. In her full armor, Shepard couldn’t feel the cold, but her HUD told her that the temperature was dropping rapidly. The first _What’s the backup plan if we can’t all make it to shelter?_ had just skittered across her mind when, thank God, the cave came into view.

It wasn’t much of a thing: a shallow entrance on the side of a low ridge, a tunnel that sloped steeply downward about six meters, and then an irregularly-shaped cavern perhaps four meters wide and three meters long, littered with gravel and small boulders. But the sudden cessation of the howling wind was a relief in itself, and when they made it to the cavern (half-carrying Garrus, now) her HUD told her that the temperature was quite a bit warmer, thanks no doubt to the insulating power of tons of rock. Not warm by any stretch, but not a killing cold, either.

Tali swept scree out of the way with her foot while Shepard helped Garrus sit and then lie down. She could see, now, the place where he’d been shot: an unlucky blast at his waist, where his armor was thinner and jointed to allow for freedom of movement. The hole was only millimeters wide, right at one of the seams of his armor, and leaking blood.

“We’ll have to get the armor off,” she said, “and apply the medigel directly.” She unlatched his helmet, batting away his bloody hands when he tried to help, then went to work on the latches that held the pieces of his torso armor together. Tali joined in, unlatching the metal ring around his cowl from his breastplate.

“Why… Commander,” Garrus managed, though his breath was growing labored from pain. His mandibles gaped, his equivalent of a grimace, and through the gap she could see that his serrated teeth were tightly clenched. “If you wanted that badly… to get me out of my clothes, all you had to do… was ask.”

Garrus responded well to gallows humor, Shepard knew, and that was why she said, “You should be so lucky, Vakarian.” She heard his laugh, which was good, but it had a wheezing edge to it that was definitely not good.

“Get a room,” Tali chimed in, though her shaking fingers on the armor latches told Shepard that she was just as worried.

Shepard unlatched all the connectors that held his chestplate to the rest of his armor, except for the ones right where the injury was. She started on those with some trepidation. She heard Garrus exhale hard, almost but not crying out, but she managed to get the last one loose and lifted off the chestpiece carefully, setting it down off to the side. Out of the corner of her eye, she could see Tali reach for the discarded armor piece, but Shepard’s attention was focused on Garrus’ exposed torso.

It was familiar to her, of course: the silvery plating that followed the lines of his musculature, his prominent keelbone, his narrow waist with its buckskin-smooth patches of unplated skin. But just this moment, she cursed that unplated skin, because that was where he was injured: on the left side, the characteristic wound of an energy weapon, small but deep and surrounded by plasma-splash burnmarks, and steadily leaking dark blue blood. Through her HUD she could see that his temperature was quite a bit lower than usual. Shock.

She found one of the medigel reserves in the side of his armor, tucked along his ribcage. It took just a nudge to pull it out. Technically, you weren’t supposed to apply medigel manually, but any marine worth their salt knew the procedure. She began to flip the cartridge end over end, throwing and catching one-handed, to make sure the gel was well-mixed. Garrus watched her narrowly, and she could see the tension in his mandibles, the way he was holding them so close and tight to his face, and behind them how his teeth gritted together. When she was sure the gel was mixed, she smacked the end against her armored thigh to loosen the cap, and cracked the cartridge open.

You weren’t supposed to touch medigel with your bare hands and contaminate it. She had to upend it and pour its contents over Garrus’ wound, tilting it to spread the gel evenly. Garrus hissed sharply between his teeth at the first touch of the omnigel, and then sighed as it spread out over his wound, sealing tight at the edges. His eyes flickered shut.

“Better?” she said.

“Hurts a hell of a lot less,” Garrus said. “If—”

He was interrupted by an angry mechanical bleat. Shepard looked over at Tali, who was still doing something to Garrus’ chestplate, while Chatika hovered helpfully by one shoulder. The chestplate gave another digital screech, shuddered, and began to hum. “There,” Tali said, sitting back on her ankles. “I’ve overclocked it to make it give off heat. I’ve pretty much wrecked the power core in the process, though, Garrus—you’ll have to get a replacement part once we’re back on the Normandy.”

“Thank you so much for ruining my armor, Tali,” Garrus said, and Shepard was relieved to hear his acerbic sense of humor, still intact. The skin of his throat was still a dismaying silvery-pale shade, but at least he could still joke.

“Hey,” Tali said, jabbing an accusatory finger at him. “My suit is rated down to eight degrees kelvin, thank you very much, so I’m quite comfortable with or without a makeshift space heater. But I happen to know that turians like it toasty.” She rested her hands on her thighs. “Although, it might not be a bad idea for you to get out of your armor too, Shepard, and… er… share body heat. I think there’s a thermal blanket in the emergency supplies.”

Shepard had a feeling that Tali was blushing behind her faceplate. “Thanks for the tip,” she said.

“And since I am the one with a suit rated for interstellar temperatures, I’ll take the first watch,” Tali added, rolling to her feet. “Besides, I want to see if I can get a signal to the Normandy out near the mouth of the cave. They must’ve made it to the drop point and started wondering where we are.”

***

With Garrus’ chestplate radiating so much heat it nearly glowed, and with Shepard stripped down to her suit’s underweave and tucked up against Garrus’s uninjured side under the thermal blanket, the cave’s chill was quite bearable. Not comfortable, though—it was probably never going to be too comfortable to lie on a cold stone floor.

Garrus dozed a little, dozed and woke, but to Shepard’s relief he was entirely lucid when he was awake. Lucid and irritable. “So stupid,” he said. “I’ve taken a lot worse without all this drama.”

“Sometimes an injury just hits you in the wrong place,” Shepard said. “All armor has joints and thinner places, because otherwise we wouldn’t be able to move in it. I don’t know a single career soldier who’s never suffered at least one unlucky shot.”

Garrus sighed. “I know. I just hate being knocked on my ass by some idiot mercenary.”

“I’ll tell Wrex you said so.”

He rolled his eyes. “Wrex is a special case, and you know it.”

“Zaeed, then.”

He laughed, a dry raspy sound. “Zaeed is damn good in a firefight, but between you and me, if he had any kind of good sense he wouldn’t get the rest of his team killed every time. If nothing else, it looks bad on a resume.”

Shepard chuckled. “Okay, point taken.”

Garrus sank into a fitful sleep not long after that. Shepard monitored his vitals with her omnitool. His temperature was rising back to normal, which was a good sign, but she wasn’t pleased with his heartbeat—it was too thin and too thready. She’d spent enough time with her cheek pressed to his chest, after all, to know what it ought to sound like.

“Shepard,” Tali said over the comm. Like most soldiers—hell, most people who interacted with aliens on any kind of regular basis—Shepard had had her communicator-translator unit surgically installed directly in her ear canal for convenience, and she was doubly grateful for that now, because that meant Tali’s voice wouldn’t wake Garrus.

“Tali,” she said, keying her own comm to pick up subvocals and pushing herself carefully up on one elbow. “Trouble?”

“No, just wanted to check and see how you were doing.”

“His vitals are stable, and he hasn’t started bleeding again. And I don’t think either of us is going to freeze to death, thanks to your trick with the armor power source.” In her mind’s eye she could see Tali’s dismissive hand gesture. (Tali never seemed to quite realize that most people, including most skilled techs, couldn’t pull off stuff like that at the drop of a hat.) “You okay out there? Any luck getting through to the Normandy?”

“No,” Tali said, her voice thick with frustration. “Something to do with the storm—it’s not just weather, it’s got something to do with the planet’s reflecting ionization. I can hear _you_ all right, but I tried sending Chatika out and I had to call her back because my signal to her started to fail after about twenty yards. I think it wasn’t just a loss of communication, either. I think the storm was interfering with her basic processes.”

Shepard leaned back against the cold stone floor with a sigh. Damn. Of _course_ it wasn’t going to be that easy, but she could hope for a break once in a while, couldn’t she? “You can come back in, then.”

“I’d rather stay out here, if it’s all right, and keep trying to get the signal through. I’ve got a few more tricks to try.”

“Keep me posted,” Shepard said, and settled down carefully against Garrus again, to wait.

She wasn’t very good at waiting.

***

Garrus woke a little later, sounding muzzy. He accepted some water collected from his armor’s emergency ration, but wouldn’t eat, which was worrying. Turians were famously ravenous after a big fight or any other stressful situation—almost as bad as biotics—making up for the energy that their lean bodies burned so prodigiously. His temperature was good, but his heartbeat still worried her, and the whistle in his breaths.

After a moment, he tugged her closer. “If I don’t make it,” he began, his voice hoarse.

Shepard interrupted him: “You’re going to make it.”

“You always say that.”

“Yeah?” She forced a confidence that she wasn’t sure she felt. “Well, I’m always right, aren’t I?”

Garrus chuckled, the sound tinny and thin. He was only using one set of his twinned vocal cords, Shepard realized, and the hell of it was that she didn’t know enough about turian medicine to have any idea how bad of a sign that was. “I guess you are.”

They were quiet for a moment. She stroked his hand, the hand that was such a mismatch for hers (too big, too few fingers, tipped with sharp talons) and yet was perfect. Then he began again, “If I don’t make it…,” and he looked briefly at her. His eyes were paler than she remembered, a crystalline blue.

She wanted to interrupt again, but she knew that if she did, it would be for her own comfort, not his. He wanted to say something. So she nodded.

He went on: “Tell my sister that I’m sorry I wasn’t around when Mom was so sick.”

“Yeah,” she said. “Okay.”

“And tell my dad that….” He hesitated. Then he laughed, a sound that stuttered like an engine failing to start. “…That he taught me what it meant to be a good turian, whether I wanted to or not.” He coughed once, dry and sharp. 

“Got it,” she said.

“And you, Shepard,” he said.

She didn’t dare breathe.

“You,” he continued, “mean more to me than any partner I’ve ever had.” His eyes drifted closed. “You…” Her heart pounded. “You get my entire Fornax collection.”

The breath left her in a sound that was half laugh and half indignant shout. “Oh my _god_ , Garrus.” He was laughing, now, for real, and though his laugh had a wan one-note quality that worried her, it was good to hear. “Oh my _god_ ,” she repeated. “You are a terrible person, Garrus Vakarian—”

“I can’t believe you fell for all that.”

“—a terrible, terrible, horrible—” 

“Isn’t the savior of the galaxy supposed to be a little bit less gullible?” Garrus spread his mandibles and raised his browplates.

Shepard was laughing too, she couldn’t help it. “I can’t believe you! Garrus! I was actually worried, you asshole.”

And then, from along the tunnel came Tali’s voice, distant and dry: “Seriously, you guys. I’m freezing my butt off out here and it sounds like you’re having a party.”

Shepard collapsed into giggles against Garrus’ good side. She pressed a kiss to the warm skin of his throat, just under his auditory membrane, and felt the purr of his sigh. He slid an arm around her shoulders, drawing her closer. “Such a jerk,” she murmured.

“You like me that way.”

She smiled to herself. “Yeah, well.”

“Besides,” he said. “I’m not going anywhere without you. You know that.”

Shepard nodded, running her fingertips along the smooth grain of the plates that ringed his cowl. There was no point in saying what she was afraid of—that someday he wouldn’t have a choice, someday one of them would go where the other couldn’t follow and she’d have to keep moving without him, somehow, as impossible as that seemed now.

After a moment she said, “Sure you don’t want anything to eat?”

“I’m afraid Tali’s protein paste is far from tempting.”

“ _Garrus_. Don’t make me order you to eat.”

He sighed. “The medigel is helping, but it still hurts enough that I don’t even want to think about eating.” He was quiet a moment, threading talons absently through her hair. “I swear, on my honor as a very bad turian, that if I still don’t want food in an hour I’ll choke some down anyway, all right?”

“Deal,” Shepard said.


	2. Chapter 2

They talked for a little while—Shepard mostly trying to keep Garrus’ mind off the pain that the medigel couldn’t entirely erase, and also to pass the time until they could get a signal out to the Normandy. She checked in on Tali via comm from time to time; felt a little bad leaving her up there alone, but Tali appeared to be keeping herself amused running through every possible signal booster or workaround she could think of. (And she could think of a _lot_.)

“It’s funny,” Shepard said, “I used to live not too far from here. Not too far in galactic terms, I mean.”

“Only a few dozen light years?” Garrus said, amused.

“Something like that. It was an old moonbase, the Alliance bought it from the batarians. I don’t remember it much. Mom used to talk about what a pain in the ass it was, since everything was designed for batarians and they’d just done the barest retrofit after the purchase. The software was all human-made but the monitor setups all expected that you had extra eyes. Mom said it about made her cross-eyed, trying to use it.”

Garrus chuckled, then made a thoughtful noise. “I know your mother was in the service. Is in the service, I should say. Your father…?”

“He was an engineer.” Shepard’s fingertips wandered over the plates of Garrus’ chest, marveling as ever at its texture like stone and yet infinitely warmer and more pliant. “Software, mostly. He did a lot of contract work, said he could do it from anywhere, so it didn’t matter that we got sent from pillar to post with Mom’s deployments. I miss him.” She felt the ache, the old hurt that had eased but never quite left since her father’s death. “It was fun, though, being a spacer brat. I saw so many ships, planets, space stations… wouldn’t trade it for anything.” Garrus had gone quiet next to her, and she gave him a gentle nudge. “What about you? You’ve never talked much about your childhood. —Unless it’s a sensitive topic?”

“No,” Garrus said. “No, not sensitive. Just not very interesting, I guess.” His mandibles relaxed a little. “My father was working for C-Sec most of the time, but they’d rotate him in and out, half the year on the Citadel and half the year home so he could be with us growing up. And we spent half the year in the city with Mom’s family and half the year up in the mountains where Dad had relatives. That’s fairly common in the Hierarchy, spreading around childrearing duties like that.” His talons scratched gently through her hair, thoughtfully. “Solana’s just a little more than a year older than me. Don’t spread it around, but she could put me in a headlock pretty much any time she wanted to—and did when she thought I was being annoying.”

“So, what, daily?”

“Ha ha ha,” he said. Then, quietly: “I should call her soon.”

“Yeah,” Shepard said, just as quietly. “I need to get in touch with Mom.”

They said nothing for a little while after that, warm together under the thermal blanket. Shepard smiled to herself at the image of a much younger Garrus, clinched in a headlock by his slightly-older sister. 

After a little while she checked her omnitool. An hour; time to bother Garrus about eating. “Garrus,” she murmured, tapping her fingertips on the plate of his shoulder. His eyelids fluttered, but he didn’t respond. Fallen asleep, then. “Garrus?” she repeated, tapping more insistently.

He barely stirred.

Suddenly alarmed, Shepard shoved herself up on one elbow—the thermal blanket slipping down, goosebumps instantly popping up along her upper arm in the chill—and switched her omnitool back to assessment mode. She’d been so pleased earlier to see that his temperature was rising, returning from the depths it had dropped when he was first injured. But it had _kept_ rising, past the turian standard of 41C. She hadn’t been able to feel the change because she’d been leaning on his side, and his thick plates insulated her a little from his body heat. But now she pressed her fingertips gently to the thinner skin of his throat—and pulled back immediately at the heat.

“Garrus,” she said, more loudly and more forcefully: the Commander voice, the one that brought anyone on her crew to attention. She never had reason to use it on Garrus anymore unless they were actually in the middle of a firefight, but she used it now. “Garrus. Respond.”

He murmured, but his eyes didn’t open. Shepard felt her mouth go dry with worry, and made herself swallow. “Tali,” she said across the comm. “Get down here.”

Tali scrambled down the tunnel with a rattle of loose gravel, Chatika humming behind her. “Something’s wrong,” she said, not a question. “What can I do?”

“I don’t know,” Shepard said. She’d run all the turian medical diagnostics she could—which wasn’t many; omnitools were a crude tool at best for medical analysis, and hers was designed with humans in mind. God only knew what it was failing to pick up. “He was doing—not well, but okay, I think, just half an hour ago.”

“What happened?” Tali slid to kneel on the floor next to Garrus, booting up her own omnitool.

“He fell asleep, which I thought was a good thing, but I tried to wake him to eat something and he’s not responding. And his temperature’s spiking, his pulse is way higher than standard. I don’t know what that means, but I don’t think it can be good.” She pounded a fist on her thigh. “ _Damn_ it! He should’ve been fine once we got the medigel on him. That injury was _well_ within the ability of medigel to handle.”

“Just a second,” Tali said, her voice tight with worry. She was typing something onto her omnitool. “I still can’t get a signal, but I’ve got a lot of information stored locally.” Shepard subsided, waiting with as much patience as she could muster as Tali’s fingers flew over the orange readout. Her heart was pounded so hard in her throat that it felt like she couldn’t swallow.

After a moment that felt like an eternity, Tali shut down her omnitool. “It’s what I was afraid of,” she said, her voice subdued. “When a quarian is badly injured, we go into shock. Humans have the same response, I think. Asari too. Most species have a similar reaction to trauma.”

“Yes?” Shepard said, barely restraining her impatience. “And?”

“Turians don’t. Not really. It’s a kind of evolutionary strategy for them. When a turian is badly injured and doesn’t get immediate medical care, they go into a—a kind of temporary state of heightened ability. Their pain tolerance is raised, their stamina increases, their mental clarity even improves. It’s an evolutionary response, since the ancestors of modern turians hunted alone and had to be able to get themselves to safety alone, too. It’s kind of like the krogan blood-rage, only less—”

“—Angry?” Shepard tried to smile and could feel herself not quite succeeding, her mouth crimping with the false expression.

“Right,” Tali said. “But unfortunately it’s also unlike krogan blood-rage in that krogans can blood-rage, come down from it, and then be fine, because they have two hearts and four kidneys and are made of concrete or whatever. For a turian it’s more like they’re borrowing against the future. If a turian goes through it, they need rest, quiet, lots of food, water, plenty of warmth, medical attention, that kind of thing, to recover the reserves they spent staying upright after serious trauma. They have to pay back what they borrowed, basically. If they don’t get it….” She trailed off.

Shepard closed her eyes. “So what do we do?”

“If we had a turian doctor here, we could probably find out more, but all I can guess is we try to keep him comfortable, and….” Tali swallowed. “Hope we get him to the Normandy soon.”

And this. This, this feeling, this helpless shaking cold at the pit of her gut, was why you weren’t supposed to date people on your crew. (Let alone fall in love with them, and—God, she hadn’t even told him that yet—) Because what she wanted to do was go to pieces over her lover, who was sick with something she didn’t understand and couldn’t fix—but what she _had_ to do was be the Commander, because she had to get them out of this. She pressed her fist to her mouth and took a deep, shaky breath—and was immediately, absurdly relieved that Tali bent her head to check something on her omnitool. She knew Tali was giving her a moment to recover herself in comparative privacy, and she was grateful.

Her teeth grated against her knuckles and she squeezed her eyes tighter against a wave of fear. She almost never worried about Garrus in a firefight: for one thing, he could usually take care of himself; for another thing, she _knew_ combat. In the past her worry for him had been abstract: worry that he would exhaust himself with overwork, worry that he’d put off talking to his family until it was too late and then would regret it for the rest of his life, worry that he’d go too far in his quest for unbending justice and lose himself in the process. She’d feared for his mental health and for his stability, but only rarely for his life.

(She could still remember, burned behind her eyelids, a vision of Garrus sprawled on the filthy floor on Omega, blood bluer than the sky spreading in a lake around his fallen body, her own panic at finding him again and then just as quickly losing him. But that had been before—before she’d known how she felt about him, before they’d become so much more to one another.)

It wasn’t rare that Garrus was in danger. But it was rare that she felt so helpless in the face of it, helpless to do anything but open her eyes and see him sleeping restlessly, his throat now not shock-pale but an unsettling shade of blue from his rising fever.

She pressed a hand to her belly and drew a deep breath, and another, and focused on that, on the steady sound of her own heartbeat and the rise and fall of her diaphragm—not to push away the terror but to see past it and through it and become the Commander again, because she knew that was the only way she could save him.

When she finally had control of herself again, she said, “All right. Help me wrap him in the thermal blanket. I don’t want him too warm but I don’t think it’d be good for his temperature to crash again.” Tali keyed off her omnitool and scrambled to do so. One they had Garrus covered, she said, “What’s the status on the storm?”

Tali’s omnitool blazed on again, and after a moment Chatika hummed into purple existence and then shot out the tunnel to the open air. Tali bent over her omnitool, the orange radiance glinting off her faceplate. “Bad still,” she said, “but it might be letting up.”

“All right,” Shepard said, shifting to sit cross-legged. She glanced once more at Garrus and—

—for just another second she let the feelings just wash over her: her fear sharp in the back of her throat; her anxiety (which she knew well was not the same as fear) trembling in her pulse and shivering in her fingers; her rage at her own helplessness a burning coal in her gut; her ferocious determination to protect him like a pillar of iron up her spine; and finally, finally, last and most, her love for him, dark and strong as black coffee or neat whisky, pouring through her, power and fear and sweetness all at once— 

—and then she inhaled, exhaled, came to all the feelings and through them like walking through the fire, brought herself back _to_ herself, and said, “I’m not as skilled an engineer as you are, Tali, but let’s see what we can do if we tackle this together.”

***

 

The solution was half technical and half tactical and entirely reliant on bravery to the point of stupidity. Shepard knew that Garrus would appreciate it—would appreciate it _eventually,_ when he came to. (She was forcing herself, now, to think ‘when’ and not ‘if,’ because it hurt too much to look at him—trembling now with fever, the stretches of his exposed skin now a frighteningly vivid blue—and think anything but ‘when.’)

Tali’s knowledge of how to hack a comm unit was well beyond anything Shepard could have come up with on her own; you missed a few things when you went into dual tech-biotic training. But Shepard knew that having someone to bounce ideas off helped, so it didn’t shock her too much when Tali broke off mid-conversation and started frantically typing into the drone control program on her omnitool, and she knew enough about engineering to know to keep quiet while Tali had her brainstorm. After a few minutes, a muffled curse, and a spate of debugging, Tali said, “There. I think I’ve found a way to bounce the signal off the ion layer.”

“What does that buy us?”

“About five times the range I was getting before. Which isn’t enough, but at least it’s better.” She could hear Tali’s sharply exasperated exhale. “But the storm is a good forty kilometers across. It’s not good enough. And without access to the aerial terrain maps, even if we try to walk _across_ the storm we’re likely to just wander around in circles until we collapse.”

And that was when the penny dropped. “Tali,” she said. “The storm is forty kilometers across. How big is it in height?”

“Well under a kilometer.” Tali gave her a skeptical look. “But even with the sensors enhanced, there’s no way we can get a signal out straight up from here. It’s still pretty far, and neither of us can fly.”

“But we’re on a ridge. Here.” Shepard rolled up her sleeve and unhooked the bracer containing her omnitool’s hardware and display projector. “Whatever you did to yours, hack it into mine. If I can climb up high enough, I should be able to get the message out that way.”

“Commander, visibility out there is almost nil, and even with my hacks your sensors are going to start giving you bad readings almost immediately. You’ll get lost, or fall off a cliff you don’t see and break your neck. Or both. We’ll go together.”

“I don’t see how two people falling off a cliff and breaking their necks would help,” Shepard said. “And we can’t just wait here—” She broke off. “Wait.”

“What?”

“I have an idea.” Shepard could feel herself starting to grin, even through the dark thicket of tangled emotions still seething at the back of her head. _I’m Commander Shepard_ , she thought, _and I’m going to get us off this rock._

***

Tali tactfully chose to do her final diagnostics at the mouth of the cave, giving Shepard a few moments alone with Garrus before they went out into the storm. Garrus was still largely unresponsive, shifting and murmuring in his sleep but not becoming lucid. Still, Shepard took his hand, winding her gauntleted fingers through his in the familiar pattern of two fingers-two fingers-thumb that made it possible to hold hands with someone with only three fingers.

“Garrus,” she said. “I know you’re out cold and probably can’t hear a damn thing I’m saying but just in case. Stay put. Tali and I are going to try to get a signal out, so we can get back to the Normandy and get you proper medical attention. I’m….” She swallowed. “I’m sorry I got you into this situation.”

She traced a fingertip along his scarred mandible. “I know it’s hardly the first time you’ve been in danger or even hurt, even badly hurt, but it’s the first time since… well, you know. Since. And it’s the first time I’ve felt so helpless about it. I just need you to be okay. All right?”

He didn’t respond, of course. She touched her fingertips to the skin of his throat, flushed an unhealthy blue from fever. She wanted to say ‘I love you.’ She didn’t want to say it now, because it was impossible to consider saying it for the very first time when Garrus wouldn’t even remember it. So instead she said, “And that’s an order, Vakarian.”

She flipped up the visor of her helmet for a moment to brush away her tears, then snapped it back down, got to her feet, and went up to join Tali.

***

“On Earth,” Shepard said over the comm, as she and Tali pushed out against the wind and into the night, “they call this a bucket brigade.”

“We call it ‘Zha’Denna’s Ladder.’” Even over the howl of the wind, Tali’s voice came close and clear in her ear over the comm. “From a time early in the Fleet when some of our ships got lost and the long-range communications array was down. We guided them home with a string of ships all using shortbeam communication. Zha’Denna vas Tenah came up with the idea and ended up as our first Patrol Fleet Admiral.”

The ridge was, at least, not a cliff; they could go up it—with some difficulty—on foot, without having to scale it. 

They left Chatika at the point at which the drone’s sensors had just started to waver, and pushed on and up. Tali had been right: between the blowing snow and the ion blanket, there was no easy navigation. Very soon, they’d both lost the location of the cave on their maps, and only had their own immediate sensors and the bright beacon of Chatika on the HUD to navigate by. (She hoped to hell Garrus would remain quietly and safely asleep in the cave. Leaving him alone when he was so ill made her anxious—but not getting a signal out would be even worse.) 

Shepard’s drone they left at the point where its connection to Chatika had just begun to fade, and then they pressed on.

“Your drone,” Tali said. “It doesn’t have a name?”

It was an inane conversation to be having as you hiked up a steep frozen slope in a screaming gale, with only a combat drone’s signal as your anchor. Shepard knew that it was precisely _because_ of that that Tali had come up with such a topic of conversation. “I guess not. I don’t really think of it as its own thing. It’s not like Glyph or Avina, who stay on all the time—I turn it on and off, I don’t keep it going all the time. It’d be like naming a piece of software.”

“I suppose,” Tali said, but she sounded dubious.

“Frankly, I always thought it was odd that you did name yours. I mean, what with the geth, I’d expect you to be wary about personifying your VIs.”

Tali snorted. “Worrying about a drone gaining sentience and taking over would be about as reasonable as worrying that your little animal—you know—”

“My hamster?”

“—right, your _hamster_.” Tali pronounced the word like an exotic novelty, which, Shepard supposed, for her it was. “It would be like worrying about your hamster taking over the Normandy.” Shepard laughed. Tali continued, “And you named your hamster, right?”

“Boo,” Shepard said. “Yeah, of course. I name the fish, too.”

“There you go. We can’t have any pets on the Flotilla. No animals at all, just embryos in stasis until we have a world to decant them on.” Her voice had gone soft, wistful. “So I name my drone.”

There was no sound for a while but their feet crunching on frost and the constant scream of the wind. “Chatika is a lovely name,” Shepard said.

“Thanks,” Tali said. “But you wouldn’t say that if you were a quarian. She’s named after a character in a really terrible children’s vid.”

Shepard couldn’t help laughing.

***

“You should stop here,” Shepard said. 

“The signal from your drone’s still okay. I can go a bit farther.”

Shepard hesitated. “I hate to pull the quarian card, but the terrain up ahead looks pretty brutal, and I don’t want you to risk a suit tear or puncture. Garrus sick is bad enough without both of you—”

“He’s my friend,” Tali said, so quietly that it was almost hard to hear over the storm. “I know he means a lot to you, but he’s my friend too. Please. If we can get a little farther—”

“All right,” Shepard said, after a long quiet moment. “We’ll go on.”

They didn’t speak as they traversed the steep cliff, with its sharp switchbacks and thorny outcroppings. She didn’t ask whether Tali was okay; didn’t ask anything at all until the signal from her drone began to fade.

“Here?” she said.

“Here,” Tali agreed. “I’ll wait for you.”

And then Shepard was alone.


	3. Chapter 3

Without even Tali’s voice in her ear, the storm seemed all the worse: the blinding white, the force of the wind pushing her, the way the interference made her sensor readings flare and spike and wobble. But amid the tie-dye shifting of her sensor readings, Tali’s beacon shone bright and clear, and although she couldn’t sense it anymore she knew that Tali could still detect her drone’s beacon, and her drone could still sense Chatika’s beacon, and Chatika could still detect the signal in Garrus’ armor, a lifeline.

A lifeline back to Garrus.

But it was a lifeline in both directions: it meant her life, to be able to follow it back to the safety of the cave… and it meant Garrus’s life that she was out here, climbing this ridge, higher and higher toward the stars where there was a ship and a doctor that could save _his_ life.

And between them a chain made of signals and beacons and hope.

_I’m not going to let you die_ , she thought, foot by foot, step by step into the wind, into the bleak emptiness of this godforsaken world, Tali’s signal on her HUD dwindling behind her until it was just a point of light and a steady beep. And she thought, suddenly, of Ashley, maybe because Ashley of all people would appreciate this kind of thing, a chain of faith and light strung across the cold and the dark. Half a league, half a league, half a league onward… they hadn’t walked even a quarter of a league, the signals wouldn’t hold that far, and yet—

(Oh, Ash, Ash, who’d held her own line, once upon a time— _I’m sorry I couldn’t save you too_ —)

Above her, finally, the whistling white began to clear and she could see stars. Behind her, Tali’s beacon flickered through the interference.

A little farther. Just a little farther. And—

Static on the comm. Static, and a voice, a blessedly familiar voice. “Comm— —pard, are you—” A deafening crackle, and then again, “—pard, come in— —peat, we —tected—”

“Commander Shepard to Normandy,” she said, making her voice as strong and clear as she could. “Three for evac, repeat, three for evac, one point three four klicks southwest of my coordinates.” It had felt so much farther to walk it, but then, a lot of that had been _up_ , not across. “Three for evac. Medical team needed, Garrus has been injured. Be advised, heavy interference from planetary ion storm. Repeat, three for evac, one point three four klicks southwest of my coordinates, medical team needed, Garrus has been injured. Be advised of ion storm interference. Repeat—”

“Got you, Commander,” and now she could hear Joker’s voice without distortion. “EDI was able to lock onto your signal and do something to clear it up.”

“Thanks, EDI,” Shepard said, feeling the weight slowly lift from her. “And thank you, Joker.”

“Three for evac, one turian-equipped medical team, one point three four klicks southwest of your coordinates, in thirty minutes.” And then, “No offense, Commander, but how the hell do you get yourself into these things?”

“Just lucky, I guess,” she said. “See you shortly. Shepard out.” And then turned and began making her way back toward Tali, toward the cave, toward Garrus and her heart.

***

“So,” Garrus drawled, from his position propped up on one of the medical bay beds. “You’re telling me that you and Tali made a brave mountain-climbing—”

“It wasn’t exactly a mountain, Garrus. It was a hundred-meter ridge.”

“—a brave mountain-climbing expedition into the heart of a howling storm to send a desperate message to the Normandy, and I _missed_ it?”

“You were out cold,” Shepard said. “Actually, you were out _hot_. Which, frankly, is why I did make a daring whatever expedition.” She nudged his shoulder. “Otherwise I would’ve just waited it out and played endless games of virtual poker in that cave with you and Tali.”

He chuckled, and then winced. (Chakwas had stabilized him, and then turned him over to the tender attentions of Mordin, who had gone on and on about the fascinating turian response to trauma and stress while producing a carefully-categorized array of medicines to bring Garrus out of his stress response and back to normal functioning. Shepard was three-quarters sure that the running commentary had been mostly designed to keep her from fretting too much.) “I’m sorry, Shepard.”

“What, ‘I’m sorry I got shot by a merc and my armor malfunctioned’? It was hardly your fault.”

“No. I mean, kind of, yes.” Garrus looked away, his eyes half-shuttering, slits of evening-blue. “I’m sorry I worried you. I’m sorry you and Tali had to risk yourselves.”

“We came out fine. Better than you, Mister Vakarian.”

Her attempt at teasing fell a little flat. “Still,” he said. “I shouldn’t—”

“Garrus, you’d do it for any of us.”

“Yeah, but—” He dragged his talon-tips down the thick weave of the medical blanket. “I hate—” He trailed off, hands fisted.

“All right, if you want to play it that way.” She straightened. “You gave Tali quite a scare. I think you owe her a drink next time you’re on the Citadel.”

His mandibles flexed tight to his face, and she knew he was thinking about Tali, so tough in spirit and so fragile in body, dragging herself up a ridge in a storm where half her tech skills didn’t work, to help save him. Then his mandibles dropped in vague amusement. “All right, I think I can manage that.” He lifted his browplates. “And do I owe you a drink, too?”

“I’m sure you can figure out a way to repay me,” she said, and he chuckled.

***

With proper medical attention, the original injury itself was a nonissue within hours. The delayed-stress response took a little longer. Mordin held him for a few days, pushing fluids and comically huge meals on him. (”Now you know what it feels like to be a biotic,” Shepard told him, and he gave her a dirty look over Mordin’s ten-course protein-rich offering.) Then he released Garrus with orders to take it easy for a few days.

“But,” Mordin said, solemnly, blinking in his slow way, “not _too_ easy.” He gave Shepard a significant look. Shepard was ninety percent certain Mordin was laughing at her behind that calm facade, and couldn’t bring herself to care one whit.

By mutual and wordless assent, they made their way to the elevator rather than to Garrus’ bed in the battery, and up the elevator to her quarters. Once there, she got him comfortably propped up with pillows, and said, “Do you want me to make you some of your tisane, or…?”

“What I want,” Garrus drawled, “is for you to come over here.”

“I think I can manage,” she said.

They both stripped down, to curl up skin to skin on the bed, her comforter draped over them—Garrus was still supposed to keep warm. It reminded her of being in the cave, under the thermal blanket.

“I was worried about you,” Shepard said, and—here, in the Loft, gave herself the luxury of giving in briefly to the pain of loving him and nearly losing him. She was surprised by the wobble in her own voice, even now, days after Garrus had left the danger zone.

He tipped his head and looked at her, eyes dark-shaded and gentle. “You don’t need to worry about me,” he said. “I’m too damn stubborn to die, you know that.”

She gasped on a choked sound, halfway between a laugh and a sob, and leaned forward to bury her face in the soft skin of his throat—the soft skin that was no longer painful in its fever-heat.

“Hey,” Garrus said, “hey, hey,” and his talons threaded through her hair, combing and smoothing. “I know. I worry about you, too.”

She rested there for a moment, breathing in the sweet-musky-metallic scent of his skin, feeling the warmth even through the thick plates of his chest, letting her breath calm itself slow, slow. Then she wound both arms around his neck, fitting them neatly around the inside of his cowl, and pulled him in for a kiss.

Kissing Garrus was almost nothing like kissing a human; the plates of his mouth were sharply-angled and had almost no malleability, and his long teeth with their serrated edges meant she had to be careful unless she wanted to end up bleeding. But they could make it work—if they were careful, they could make it work. The brush of his flexible tongue across her lips and then touching her tongue sent slow shivers down her spine. He tasted like nothing she could put any name to, some alien taste born on Palaven, something that had never existed on Earth. How strange and how wonderful, that two evolutionary paths on two wholly different planets could bring them together, here and now in this place, a journey of a million years culminating on her bed.

His fingers dragged through her hair and then up and down her back, soothing her and at the same time diffusing sparks of warmth through her whole body. Pleasure skittered over her skin, tightened her nipples, heated between her legs. She dragged her fingers back through the spines of his crest, loving the texture of them, grained like fine wood and rigid in a way that the rest of his plates were not. He growled, low and dual-toned and vibrating, and she smiled against his mouth and trailed her fingers down to the velvety skin just beneath his fringe at the back of his neck. She scratched lightly with her fingertips, and he broke off the kiss and tipped his head back, so much like a cat enjoying a good scratching that it made her chuckle. She leaned in and bit lightly at the exposed sensitive skin under his jaw, and he yelped and then gave her a mock-stern look.

“You have to watch out for us humans, Mister Vakarian,” she said. “We’re sneaky.”

“So I gather,” he said with a roll of his eyes.

She trained her hands down over the plates of his chest, loving the warm brushed-metal texture of them, the way they flexed just a little under her fingertips, like leather. (She knew she was taking the opportunity to reassure herself that he was alive—knew it and didn’t care. He _was_ alive, and there wasn’t any harm in putting her hands on him to reassure herself of that fact.) The plates grew broader lower down, down to the single narrow guard-plate that shielded his belly, with the wide patches of unplated skin on either side—unplated skin that gave him freedom of movement, unplated skin soft under her fingers, unplated skin that he loved for her to touch. She ran her hands over it, not teasing now but pressing her palms flat and running them up and down and feeling more than hearing the low insistent throb of his purr. His skin there wasn’t textured like his plates but slick-smooth and warm; she could feel his heartbeat through it, feel his each stuttering inhale and exhale. Thanks to the miracles of Chakwas’ medical ability, she couldn’t even feel the scar where he’d been hit. (But she remembered it, the blue blood leaking between Garrus’ knuckles, the wound that she’d covered with glittering omnigel. She’d always remember that, she thought.)

It didn’t take much stroking of his narrow waist before Garrus gave a semicoherent growl and hauled her bodily into his lap. She almost overbalanced and fell off him, and had to steady herself, laughing, with her fingers gripping tight around his cowl. She shifted to straddle his thighs, sliding her hands in from the thinner skin of his waist to the plate that shielded his belly. And then, lower, to the complex arrangements of plates at his groin, which had already loosened enough that she could just see the tip of his cock, flushed blood-blue. She stroked it, knowing that it was even more sensitive before it fully emerged, and Garrus hissed and tipped his head back.

“Feeling eager?” she asked, stroking around the edges of his groin plating, feeling the moisture there, the contrast between the thick silvery plates and the tender flesh they protected.

“Hey, I’m not the one who went right for the waist,” Garrus said, slitting his eyes open to meet her gaze.

“Your waist is pretty hard to resist.”

He gasped as she dipped her fingers to stroke the head again. “Looks like we’ll make a good turian of you yet.”

“That way at least _one_ of us will be one,” she said, and leaned in to kiss him before he could think of a good retort to that. She settled one hand on his waist, the other sliding up and down the edges of his vent, and licked carefully, carefully, into his mouth until his lithe tongue flicked against hers. She could just feel the points of his deadly teeth against her lip, sharp but not enough to cut the skin.

With a suddenness that sent a bolt of wet heat straight through her, his cock slid out of its sheath and into her waiting hand, smooth and slick and so hard. Her fingertips skated up and down, stroking the ridges. She could feel his pulse, here, too, the strong beating of his heart echoed through his body. His hands moved from where they’d settled on her hips, gliding down over her thighs and between her legs. She shivered at the feeling of his thick forefinger parting her folds and testing her, then slipping into her. She inhaled sharply, eyelids flickering, and squeezed around his cock.

“Ready?” Garrus asked, voice low and dark and flanging with arousal, and she couldn’t think of a single clever or even not-clever thing to say, so she just nodded.

He pulled his hands away from her, then hooked them around her waist and lifted her. She kept her fingers tight around his shaft so she could guide him in as Garrus lowered her—deliciously slow—onto him.

The feeling as he slid up inside her made her squeeze her eyes shut and curl her toes. She could feel each subtle ridge rub over her inner lips as he pushed up, and the gentle curvature of his shaft made his head rub firmly against her inner walls as she took him in, deeper and deeper, until her thighs were flush and trembling against the spurs of his hips. His expression looked as rapt and overwhelmed as she felt: mouth a little open, mandibles drawn in, eyes shut. She stayed there a moment, savoring the feeling of him in her, so full and pulsing with his heartbeat and her arousal. Then she shifted her shins on the bed and pushed herself upward.

She slid up, up—feeling the ridges rub over her again, the slow caress of his tip—until he was almost out, and then sank back down again just as slow. His fingers tightened around her waist, claw-tips pricking her skin without breaking it. She could smell their mingled arousal, heady on the air: him, sharp and sweet as crushed cardamom, her own scent darker and muskier. His grip settled lower on her hips and he began to guide her—slow and savoring at first and then faster as her pulse picked up more, a primal rhythm thundering in her blood, matched in his.

With each thrust, he arched up and she ground down to get closer, deeper, tighter, _more_. She cried out—at first an involuntary gasp, the sound of her breath eking out of her lungs, but growing into a moan, a cry, marking the rhythm, marking the shock of pleasure each time he sank into her again. Garrus leaned forward to nuzzle her bare shoulder, mandibles flaring to give him room to nip her skin between the rigid plates of his mouth, something halfway between a kiss and a bite. Pleasure spiraled up and up, delicious and unrelenting, a pleasure that she couldn’t resist and didn’t want to. And she could hear the same pleasure in Garrus’ voice: he didn’t cry out, but she could hear his flanging growl on each breath, two sounds that merged and separated into a counterpoint and then merged again.

Her orgasm built until all she could do was clutch at him, one hand wrapped around his hip-spur and the other digging into the soft skin behind his fringe, and she felt as though every muscle in her body was tightening, drawing him deeper, grinding down and tensing in preparation for—

—the earthquake that shook her, hot as magma liquefying her bones, so intense that her throat was too tight for a scream, too tight for anything but a shuddering moan. She pulsed and rippled around him, and the thickness of his cock inside her sent the aftershocks rebounding through her, on and on until all she could do was lean boneless and melted against him. His hands dragged her down flush against him and even in the dizziness of her afterglow she could feel him pulsing inside her.

She stayed that way for a while, not speaking—her sweat cooling, his skin heating up as his body flushed its excess temperature. She stayed that way so long that she felt his cock twitch and begin to retract, and only then slid off into a boneless heap beside him.

After a moment, she felt him stroke a hand through her hair and then tug her closer against him.

“So,” he said, after a moment, his voice rough: “did I make it up to you?”

“For now,” she said, and smiled a private smile against his side.

“Should I be worried?”

“Maybe a little,” she said, and then pushed herself up on one elbow to lean over him, to kiss him, her short hair swinging forward to veil their faces. In her weariness she was clumsy, cut her tongue on the edge of one of his teeth, tasted blood. Small price to pay. “I love you, you know,” she said, what she couldn’t say in the cave because he couldn’t hear—what she couldn’t miss the chance to say now, when he could.

“Yeah,” he said after a moment. “Me too.”

“Good,” she said, and maybe it wasn’t like in vids, maybe there was no swelling of music, no poetry, but it was enough. It was right for them and it was enough. She trailed her fingers down his body, down to the impossible softness of his waist, the invisible scar.

Garrus tilted her chin up until she met his eyes, glacial blue. “Shepard,” he said, slowly. “I’ve never regretted following you anywhere you care to lead me.”

She smiled.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks to everyone for sticking with me on my first experiment with posting something unfinished. ♥


End file.
